Sunday, August 05, 2007

Home Leave

We apologize for jumping ahead in the script a bit, but the staff is currently on Home Leave in Colorado and quite enjoying it. The staff photographer took approximately one million pictures on the way through Mexico of which 999,990 will need to be discarded, and your correspondent hasn't written a word about the trip. But we took a much more manageable number of pictures on a trip out onto the Eastern Plains of Colorado, to such exotic Colorado locations as Brush, Anton, Akron, and a town that is literally no-joke called Last Chance.

For those who are curious, "Home Leave" is a required month of vacation in the United States between Foreign Service Officers, so that we don't forget what's so great about the country we're out there representing or go native or start identifying with the terrorists or what-not. We're struggling through.

Anyway, if you want to see what the staff photographer has been up to since our arrival, and get to know the part of Colorado that doesn't look like Aspen, check out this quick slideshow at Flickr.

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Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.